The Theory of Maximum Hassle
By Paris Mercurio ‘23, Gadjah Mada University Fellow 2023-2025
My first two weeks in Indonesia were a whirlwind of new sights, experiences, and people. After so many months of applications, preparation, planning, and seemingly endless waiting, I was so excited to have finally arrived that I barely gave myself a minute to sit alone with my thoughts or process everything that was happening around me. I spent my mornings studying Bahasa Indonesia, afternoons exploring the city with new friends I’d made at my homestay, and evenings eating delicious homecooked meals with my host family. Things were going so swimmingly that I even began to believe that, by keeping myself busy and throwing myself into every opportunity, I could somehow bypass the “reality check” moment that almost every Shansi Fellow has experienced. Then, towards the end of my second week, once the initial excitement of my arrival had started to die down, I found myself alone at my homestay. Sam, my senior fellow, was still out of town for summer break, and Ari, the incoming Aceh fellow, had yet to arrive in Jogja for her language training. Suddenly finding myself with an abundance of time on my hands, I set out to prove to myself that I could navigate Jogja alone. I went for walks by myself and tried not to feel out of place as one of the only pedestrians in a generally non-walkable city. I went to see Barbie and found myself not only the sole foreigner in the theater, but also the only person watching the movie without a friend. Though I typically enjoy being alone and never would’ve thought twice about going to a restaurant, mall, or movie theater by myself in the US, it felt different to be alone in a brand new city––not by choice, but by necessity. Before I knew it, the loneliness I’d been trying so hard to stave off had crept up on me.
Amid this gloomy period, another American began lessons at my language school. Paula, who lived in Seattle, had visited Jogja several times throughout her life and knew a lot about the city. Both of her parents were from Indonesia, and she was back in Jogja for a solo trip after attending a family reunion in Bali the week before. I was so grateful for her arrival and relieved to have her company and expertise. When she invited me to an experimental performance at an art museum, the Jogja National Museum, I immediately accepted.
A night out in Malioboro, Jogja’s most popular tourist street, with Sam (Yogyakarta 2021-2023), Ari (Banda Aceh 2023-2025), and our friend Brenda
After the show (which was very cool to watch but almost entirely incomprehensible to me because the entire thing was in Indonesian), we split a GrabCar home. Because we were encouraged to converse in Indonesian at our language school, and because Paula’s language skills were much more advanced than mine, our previous conversations had been quite rudimentary. On the ride home from the museum, we finally spoke in English. This was one of the first times since arriving in Indonesia that I’d been able to express my thoughts and feelings to anyone in person. In my daily conversations with my homestay hosts and Indonesian teachers, I was limited to expressing myself in what little Indonesian I could––I hadn’t even learned the words for basic emotions yet. It was surprisingly refreshing just to be able to communicate without so much effort. I explained to Paula that this was my first time traveling alone, and practically traveling at all. Up until a few months before I arrived in Indonesia, I hadn’t been on an airplane in nearly nine years.
“You don’t really seem like a first-time traveler to me,” she assured me, “if that makes you feel any better.” It did.
She asked me what my biggest challenges had been so far. I mentioned being left-handed, as it is considered disrespectful to eat meals or hand people things with your left hand in Indonesia, and how this has required me to constantly be aware of my subconscious actions and intentional with my hand movements to avoid unconsciously offending someone. (While my left-handedness has proven to be much less of an issue over the past 6 months, at this time, it was something I worried about often.) This led us into a larger conversation about differences between life in Indonesia and the United States, and how travel has a way of shedding light on aspects of one’s own identity that have previously gone unnoticed. I asked Paula about how her travels were going, and she enumerated the struggles she’d encountered even as an experienced traveler, which made me feel less alone.
Karaoke Night with the Shansi fellows and the INCULS (UGM Indonesian Language Class) to celebrate our supervisor Mbak Alva’s birthday
“A friend of mine has this theory about travel that he calls “Maximum Hassle,” she told me. “He says that the point of travel is to experience as much hassle as you possibly can, and if you’re not constantly running into issues, then you’re not traveling the right way.”
Though I nodded along at the time, I was not completely on board with the idea. Why would you want to welcome inconvenience into your life? I was still holding onto my secret, silent hope, as unrealistic as I knew it was, that I might somehow adjust to life in Indonesia with little to no struggle. But something about the Theory of Maximum Hassle lodged itself into my brain that night, and over the past six months, it has reared its head: when a debilitating case of food poisoning forced me to bail out on my own UGM welcome party only hours before it was scheduled to begin; when, halfway through that neverending week when I was bedridden and feverish, my air conditioning unit started spraying water onto my bed, and, by the time I was strong enough to strip and change my bedsheets, it had already begun to mold; when my GrabBike driver accidentally dropped me off in a nondescript alleyway minutes before I was supposed to start teaching a class; when, in an attempt to invite a new friend to my evening plans, I mixed up the word for “join” (Ikut) with “fish” (Ikan), prompting a very confusing exchange for the both of us wherein she tried to figure out why I was offering her fish, and I had no clue what she was talking about. Every time I’ve shown up to class dripping with sweat because the sun and humidity got the best of me on what was supposed to be a relaxing walk; every time I’ve had to trap and release a big, scary bug that found its way inside my house; every time I’ve made dinner plans for 6 pm and, forgetting to factor in Indonesian Time, was famished by the time we finally started eating at 8: Maximum Hassle. While I’m pretty sure that the original theory was only supposed to apply to travel, I’ve found that it has translated quite well to my experience adjusting to life abroad.
Meeting some cute kittens on the street while exploring the city with my friends Vania, Tamsin, and Claudia (left to right)
It reminds me, first and foremost, that there’s nothing wrong or bad about struggling. Not only is it an inevitable part of the process, but a quintessential, even defining, component of the experience. No, not even that––often, the struggle is the experience. It doesn’t mean I’m doing the Fellowship wrong. If anything, it means I’m doing something right––over the past several months, the other Shansi Fellows and I have texted back and forth, lamenting and bonding over our shared and individual struggles. When I look back on my experience so far, I don’t remember the days when everything went completely fine and according to plan. I remember the time my new friend and I got lost inside the parking deck of a mall while trying to exit a late-night movie showing, the time I got stuck in one of the first rains of the season before I’d gotten around to buying a jacket, and the time the classroom projector overheated right in the middle of midterm presentations and my students tried to help me get it back up and running. Little moments like these are the real stuff of life; they’re what living actually is.
The Theory of Maximum Hassle also serves as a helpful reminder that most worthwhile things don’t come easily. If I were to wait around for perfect, easy opportunities to fall into my lap, I’d likely be waiting forever. When I wasn’t sure how to go about making friends in Jogja, I knew they wouldn’t just find me––I had to put in effort, and lots of it. I thought it best to exhaust all possible friend-making avenues. I reached out to people I’d met once in passing weeks earlier and asked them if they’d want to get coffee sometime. I struck up conversations with baristas at the coffee shops I frequented and chatted with them on their breaks. I accepted every invitation I received, and when I met someone new, I was always sure to ask for their Instagram username––I quickly learned that the exchange of Instagram handles is an even more common practice in Indonesia than getting someone’s WhatsApp number.
Of course, there was plenty of hassle involved. Once, I was invited by a new friend to join her and a group on a day trip to Borobodur, an ancient Buddhist temple just over an hour by car outside of the city. When I misread the time that the group car would depart and accidentally slept in, missing the group ride to the temple, all I could think was that I might be missing out on a chance to make some great new friends. With this in mind, I got ready in under ten minutes and booked an hour-long Grab ride on the back of a motorbike to make it to the temple. When I finally arrived, sweaty and disheveled, I immediately switched to Social Mode, finding the energy to befriend the new people on the trip.
Finally reaching the top of Ijen Crater with new friends Lani and Helena after hours of hiking
Sure enough, a few of the people I met at Borobudur that day became some of my closest friends in Jogja, and they introduced me to plenty more. Some invited me to join them on weekend trips to other parts of Indonesia, and I always took these opportunities, disregarding my concerns about overcommitting or exhausting myself. In October, I didn’t spend a single weekend in Jogja because I had agreed to so many weekend trips. On weekends like these, I navigated a nearby beach town with nearly zero cell service, stayed in a hostel that ran out of water and had to bathe in the ocean, got horrendously sunburnt while snorkeling for the first time, and slept in a treehouse while a giant rat scurried around the floor and rummaged through my backpack. Two days in a row, I woke up at two in the morning just to spend hours hiking up steep, dusty mountains in the dark, and only one of those times did I successfully reach the peak before sunrise. So many of these things I never would’ve imagined choosing to do of my own volition before I moved to Indonesia. In the US, I had a distaste for heat and humidity, being barefoot and wearing open-toed shoes, the beach, and seeing whatever creatures lurked underwater. Considering all of these things, I’m sure you’re probably wondering what made me want to move to Indonesia. Well, what better way to challenge those discomforts? That’s what I mean about Maximum Hassle––I was seeking it out before I had a name for it.
Though I certainly kept myself busy at first, I eventually had to lean into the necessity and value of being alone. My discomfort around feeling lonely in Jogja came from the fact that I was viewing it as a failure––if I didn’t have plans one night and sat alone in my house watching Netflix, I saw that, on some level, as a personal failure to make the most of my time. I was not allowing myself to indulge in alone time in the same way that I would in the US, and I was not viewing it as a completely necessary part of building a sustainable life anywhere. Part of the problem was that I had yet to accept that waiting can often be the biggest (and most important) hassle. When I first arrived in Indonesia, there were so many things I wanted right away. I wanted group of good friends, a sense that I knew exactly what I was doing as an English teacher, and a comprehensive understanding of how the city worked and where to go to find whatever I needed. In short, I wanted a fast track to the feeling of being settled into life in Jogja, the chance to proudly tell my family and friends that I’d figured everything out, and to feel like I’d already “made it,” whatever I imagined that feeling to be. But no matter how much effort I put toward these goals, they would take time and patience.
Exploring an ArtJog exhibit at the Jogja National Museum with Brenda
In mid-December, I completed my first semester at UGM, said goodbye to my friends, and left Jogja without a return ticket, unsure whether I’d be back in three weeks or two months. I flew to Hanoi and spent ten days hiking and motorbiking through northern Vietnam with a UGM exchange student I’d only met a few times before we decided to travel together. We woke up early in cramped hostels just as the late-night party-going crowd was returning to our shared room to sleep. We lugged our heavy backpacks onto and off of buses, befriended other travelers, sang karaoke, and got peer pressured by our tour guides into taking shots of “Happy Water,” a Vietnamese rice alcohol. Underprepared for the bitter cold, we spent two nights in unheated hostels in the mountains––huddled together in one bed, wearing every layer of clothing we’d brought, and swaddled in blankets.
After we parted ways, I flew to Bangkok to join several members of the 2023-2025 Shansi cohort on a group trip. It was so comforting to spend the holidays and enter the new year with people who had known me for longer than six months, and who understood the whirlwind of the fellowship experience better than anyone else in the world because they were living it too. We discussed the particulars of our respective sites, described the friends we’d met and the people we worked with, and reminisced on our time at Oberlin, comparing notes and discovering where our paths had intersected over the years. We spent the start of the new year in an airport and, after finding our hostel’s check-in desk and lobby completely empty, spent the first night of 2024 sleeping squashed like sardines on the two beds available in a nearby hotel.
One year ago at this time, I was working at the front desk of a hotel while I impatiently awaited the release of Shansi decisions. During my late-night shifts at the front desk, I filled my downtime by reading these blog posts on the Shansi site over and over again, imagining what my life could look like in a year. Thinking back on that time, I’m overwhelmed with love and gratitude for everything that has entered my life since then: an extremely kind, genuine, and supportive cohort of co-fellows, a welcoming department of coworkers and an amazing senior fellow, more travel opportunities than I could have anticipated, the kind of beautiful nature I had only ever seen in photos, all the things I’ve learned, and the friends I’ve made from all around the world. If every step of the journey had been easy and hassle-free, looking back on it all wouldn’t feel half as rewarding.
Posing with my (aptly named) travel buddy Asia on the second day of a 3-day motorbike tour around the Ha Giang Loop in Northern Vietnam
And after all that waiting, the “I’ve made it” moments have indeed started coming––I’ve had quite a few of them over the past two months. I felt it when I found myself at a rooftop bar saying goodbye to that semester’s cohort of study abroad students and, looking around, I realized that I was the only person there who wasn’t a student in the program: how had I managed to infiltrate such a large group to the point where I felt like a part of them in some way? I felt it while sunbathing in Thailand, watching my co-fellows race each other across the pool: how had I gotten lucky enough to start the new year in such a beautiful way? I felt it again when, on the last day of our trip, the Shansi Fellows arranged a surprise early birthday dinner and karaoke night for me: how lucky was I to be a part of such an accomplished and genuinely kind community of individuals? But I’ve also felt it right in the middle of the hassle, lugging my dirty clothes to the nearest laundromat to my hostel in Cambodia on the morning of my 23rd birthday, or rushing through the Kuala Lumpur airport to make my connecting flight: I’m here, and I’m figuring it out.
My original three-week trip turned into nearly two months of backpacking after all, and while I still have another week of traveling ahead of me, I’ve been keeping a list of things I need to do upon my return to Jogja: put some effort into decorating my room so that it no longer looks like a “hospital room” or a “teenage boy’s bedroom” (according to my brother and my co-fellows, who have seen pictures); go to the tailor and finally get those pants hemmed, which I’ve been putting off since before I even left the US; try my best to salvage those suede teaching shoes I was wearing when the sky spontaneously opened up and released one of the first downpours of the rainy season. It’s funny––even after all those “I’ve made it” moments, the ceiling might still leak when it rains, and the neighborhood cats will still succeed in knocking over the trash can. Hassle is a strange but comforting constant, and one that I’m now immeasurably grateful to have. I’ll keep on following where it leads.